The emergency procedures came back in the order Silas had drilled them, not as remembered words but as physical actions her hands were already performing before her conscious mind had finished processing the instrument panel’s red lamp.
Recover attitude first. Then position. Then power management.
She pulled back on the stick, canceling forward thrust. The Skiffer’s nose began to rise against the yaw, the three functioning rotors fighting the asymmetric moment that the dead left forward rotor was generating. The spin rate reduced but did not stop. She was still rotating left, still at speed, the farm’s fields and treeline and collapsed barn cycling through her field of view in a blur.
Her left hand found the manual pitch control panel without her looking at it. Four levers, one per rotor, each one a direct mechanical connection to that rotor’s blade articulation cam, bypassing the electrical pitch control system entirely.
She found the right rear lever. Third from the left. She pulled it three firm notches into the forward-and-up bias detent, felt the mechanism click home at each notch, felt the third detent lock. The right rear rotor’s blades shifted to a permanent forward-up vector, generating a thrust component that pushed the Skiffer’s nose up and to the right, countering the leftward yaw that the dead port forward rotor was driving. The rotation slowed further.
Right forward lever, second from the left. Two notches up, maximum safe bias. She set it, felt both detents, held the lever at the second position. The right forward rotor’s increased upward thrust component worked against the roll that had been developing along with the yaw. She backed the bias off a single half-notch with her thumb, reducing the magnitude just enough that it would not over-pitch the nose once the rear rotors were sharing the correction load.
Left rear lever, rightmost. One notch forward-and-up. She set it. The left rear rotor added its contribution to the pitch correction, sharing the load with the right pair, the three-rotor system finding a new and degraded but functional equilibrium.
Left forward lever, leftmost. The dead rotor. She hauled it fully out to the level detent, setting the blade pitch to zero eccentricity. The unpowered rotor stopped trying to contribute to the system’s torque balance and instead began to windmill in the airflow passing through its arc, the flat blades generating a small symmetrical lift component that cost nothing from the electrical system.
The Skiffer stopped spinning.
Not immediately. The momentum of the flat spin dissipated over two or three seconds as the new thrust configuration imposed its corrections, the rotation rate dropping from its peak through a deceleration that she could feel as a change in the centrifugal pressure against the outside of the cockpit cage bars. Then it stopped, and she was flying straight, or nearly straight, the Skiffer’s nose pointed at a section of fallow field to the northeast that she did not recognize as part of the farm.
She checked the airspeed indicator. Ninety-eight miles per hour.
She looked up from the instrument panel and found sky and field and no immediate landmark she recognized. In the time it had taken her to work through the four manual lever adjustments, the Skiffer had completed multiple rotations and traveled an unknown distance in an unknown direction. She was above a fallow field, at an altitude she estimated at twenty-five feet, traveling northeast at ninety-eight miles per hour, and she did not know which way the farm was.
The three live ammeters on the instrument panel were in the yellow, which meant the three remaining rotors were operating at elevated current draw to compensate for the missing rotor’s contribution, but were within the range the motors could sustain for a limited period. She watched the left rear ammeter specifically, because that motor was carrying the largest correction load given its lever position, and its needle was the furthest into the yellow.
She yawed the Skiffer right, slowly, scanning the ground below and the horizon ahead. The field she was over gave way to another field at a fence line, and then another, and then the dark shape of the treeline to the north resolved itself and gave her a reference. The treeline was to the north. The farm was south of the treeline.
She turned south.
The collapsed barn roof appeared first, the fallen section distinct from the standing sections. She reduced speed and descended, trading airspeed for altitude margin, watching the port rear ammeter as the speed reduction changed the load distribution across the three rotors. The needle moved further into the yellow.
She kept her eyes moving between the ammeter and the ground below.
“Easy,” she said, to herself, to the Skiffer, to no one in particular. Her voice was steady. She noticed this with a distant part of her attention, the part that was not occupied with the landing. “Ease it into the barnyard and down to the ground.”
The barnyard opened below her, the cart visible in the driveway area, and she reduced the collective in a controlled descent, bringing the Skiffer down over the collapsed barn roof with five feet of clearance and then continuing down as the ground came up. The left rear ammeter needle pushed further into the yellow as the descent rate reduced and the rotors worked harder to slow her.
She touched the ground at the center of the driveway area, the Skiffer settling onto all four landing pads, and she dropped the collective to zero in a single smooth motion.
She closed the throttle on the boiler. She heard the combustion chamber shut down, the turbine beginning its long deceleration, the generator output dropping as the mechanical input from the turbine reduced. She worked through the shutdown sequence in order, each step taken deliberately, her hands moving to the correct controls without hesitation. Throttle to zero. Steam valve closed. Motor contactors open. Battery isolated from the charging circuit. Main bus open.
The ammeter needles dropped to zero together. The turbine RPM needle fell through its long declining curve. The three functioning cyclorotors spun down on their remaining momentum, the blade articulation returning to neutral as the electrical pitch control system lost its power source, the mechanical manual levers holding their set positions until she returned them to neutral by hand, which she did.
The Skiffer was quiet. The barnyard was quiet. She could hear the wind in the dead grass at the field edge and something moving in the standing section of the barn and the distant sound of a road somewhere beyond the treeline.
She looked at her hands on the controls.
They were not shaking.
She released the collective and the stick and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, looking at the instrument panel with its needles all at rest. Her heart rate was elevated. She could feel it in her throat and in the pressure behind her eyes. But it was not the elevation of panic. It was the elevation of sustained physical effort.
She unbuckled the harness straps and climbed out of the cockpit over the left side cage bar. Her boots hit the ground, and her legs held her, firm and immediate, and she stood beside the Skiffer and took her helmet off.
Silas was already there. He had covered the distance from his position at the edge of the driveway at a pace that was as fast as his bad leg permitted, and he arrived beside her slightly out of breath. He looked at her face. He looked at the Skiffer. He looked at the left forward rotor.
“You handled it good, June,” he said. There was something in his voice that she did not immediately identify. Pride, definitely, which was good. But there was something alongside it, too, and that something made her worried.
He bent down to the port forward cyclorotor and took hold of the motor’s end cap. The cap came away in two pieces, the separation clean and deliberate, the edges machined rather than broken. He straightened and held the pieces out to her.
Inside the cap, where the motor’s rear bearing housing should have been, was a different assembly entirely. She could see a small coil of fine wire wound around a ferrite core, a relay no larger than her thumb, and a compact rectangular unit with a wire aerial coiled inside the housing.
A radio receiver.
She looked at the components in Silas’s hands. She looked at Silas.
“What is that?” she asked
Silas set the pieces on the cart surface. He looked at her steadily. “I had to be sure you were ready.”
The silence that followed lasted four seconds.
“Explain it,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“The coil picks up voltage inductively from the motor supply wire,” Silas said. He used the tone he used when explaining technical matters, precise and sequential. “It doesn’t tap the wire directly. It generates its own current from the field around the supply wire, enough to power the relay and the receiver. When the receiver gets the signal, the relay closes a secondary coil that generates a magnetic field inside the motor housing. The field disrupts the motor’s own magnetic alignment. The motor cogs. It stops producing torque.” He paused. “From outside, it presents identically to a winding failure.”
She looked at the assembly on the cart. She identified each component as he had described it. The inductive pickup coil. The relay. The receiver. The secondary coil that had reached inside her left forward motor and stopped it at one hundred and thirty-six miles per hour at thirty feet.
“You built a device,” she said, “that you have never tested, and you installed it on my Skiffer, and you triggered it while I was flying at speed, and you did not tell me.”
“Yes,” Silas said.
“You, who tests everything. Who has told me, for two weeks, at every step of this build, that we do not proceed until we know what we have.”
“Yes.”
“And this device, which you built and installed without telling me, you tested it when?”
Silas did not answer.
“You didn’t test it,” she said.
“I couldn’t test the device in isolation,” he said. “What I needed to test couldn’t be tested in isolation. The device was a means to an end.”
“The end being what?”
“The end being whether you could recover a rotor failure at speed without losing the aircraft.” He met her eyes. “I couldn’t simulate that on the ground. I couldn’t simulate it tethered. I needed to see what you did when it actually happened, when you had no reason to expect it, when the adrenaline was real, and the ground was real, and the consequences were real.” He paused. “One thing you cannot test for on the ground is whether someone has the mettle to fly. I needed to know before you go to the Exposition.”
She stared at him.
“You nearly killed me,” she said. “Your untested device, on my aircraft, at speed.”
“I was watching the entire time. I had the transmitter in my hand. If the Skiffer had gone into a situation you couldn’t recover, I would have cut the device’s power and restored the motor.”
“At thirty feet. At one hundred and thirty-six miles per hour.”
Silas was quiet for a moment. He put his hands up, palms out, and said: “You’re right. I should not have done it the way I did it. I was worried that you were too eager, that the eagerness was outrunning your judgment, and I made a decision I should not have made unilaterally. I should have told you what I was planning.”
“You should have asked me,” June said. “Not told me. Asked me.”
“Yes.”
She looked at the Skiffer. She looked at the left forward rotor with its real end cap still attached and the fake end cap sitting on the cart filled with the assembly of components that had stopped it. She looked at the fields and the farmhouse and the position of the sun, which had moved considerably since they had arrived that morning.
“I want another flight,” she said.
Silas looked at her expression. He looked at the Skiffer. He looked back at her.
“The pre-flight sequence,” he began.
She was already climbing into the cockpit.
She ran through the pre-flight sequence. She did not rush it, exactly, but she performed each step with a compressed efficiency that covered the ground faster than the morning’s methodical pace had. Boiler activation, relay sequence, accumulator pressure, sparker armed. She heard the combustion thump and watched the temperature climb and watched the turbine spin up and watched the generator output stabilize at seventy-one volts.
Cyclorotors, one at a time. She activated the left forward motor and watched its ammeter. The needle moved to its normal operating position and held there, steady, as it had in every check run since the rewind.
All four within spec.
Silas opened his mouth.
She looked at him then hauled up on the collective.
The Skiffer went up fast, as if on fire, because her hand moved the collective further and faster than she had moved it before, and the Skiffer responded to what she gave it without opinion or hesitation. Ten feet passed and continued to twenty, and she let it climb to twenty-five before she leveled it with a forward stick input that banked the craft over the farmhouse roof hard enough that she felt the frame flex slightly in the turn.
She shoved the throttle to the forward stop.
The speed built fast. The cage bars blurred in her peripheral vision and the wind became a physical pressure against her chest and face, and the airspeed needle climbed through one hundred and kept going. She was past the thousand-foot loop boundary in seconds, the farm falling behind her as she accelerated outward over the fallow fields, and she did not look back at it.
She was seething. The anger was present in her jaw and her hands and the back of her throat, and she did not try to suppress it. She flew with it, the Skiffer responding to every input she gave it with the precision and immediacy she had spent months building it to have.
She was past the road. Fields opened below her that were not the farm’s fields. A herd of cattle in a pasture to her left scattered as the Skiffer’s passage disturbed them, breaking from their grazing in all directions across the pasture, their reaction visible from above as a sudden expansion of brown shapes across green.
She did not care about the cattle.
The goggles pressed against her face and the pressure behind her eyes was not anger alone. She recognized the other thing under the anger and refused to let it out, because if it came out she was not confident she could bring it back.
She looked at the airspeed indicator.
Two hundred and ten miles per hour.
She looked at the ammeters. All four needles were at the red line, touching it, the generator’s output voltage needle pegged fully to the right, the system running at the absolute ceiling of what it could produce. The turbine RPM indicator was two thousand revolutions past its rated maximum, in a zone of the dial where she had written no numbers because she had not expected to go there.
You are no good to your family as a corpse.
She heard it in his voice, the specific flat certainty of it, the voice he used when he was not making an argument but stating a fact he expected her to accept. And underneath her anger and underneath the thing she was not letting out, she heard it land the way it always landed, which was accurately.
She pulled the throttle back smoothly to the fifty percent detent.
The speed began to drop. One hundred and eighty. One hundred and sixty. The ammeters came back from the red line and the generator voltage needle moved off its peg and settled into the operational band. She breathed through her nose and out through her mouth and did it again. The anger was still there, but it had stopped running the Skiffer.
She came around in a wide arc, finding the farm by the barn’s collapsed roof section visible from altitude, and descended toward it on a long, shallow approach that she flew with her hands and her eyes and the part of her mind that had, over the past several weeks, learned to do this without being asked to think about it.
She crossed the barn roof with clearance to spare, lined up with the cart in the driveway, and reduced the collective in a descent that was controlled and deliberate and brought the Skiffer’s landing pads onto the cart within three inches of center.
She shut everything down in sequence. Every step. Every check. She did not skip any of them.
When the last needle was at zero, and the last rotor had stopped, and the ticking of the cooling steam generator was the only sound from the Skiffer, she climbed out, removed her helmet, removed her gloves, and set them on the cart.
Silas was standing ten feet away. He had been standing there since she landed, not moving toward her and not moving away, his notebook at his side and his pencil behind his ear.
She did not say anything to him. She went to the left forward rotor and began checking the mounts, working her way around the rotor mount methodically, checking each fastener with the torque wrench from the toolbox. She checked the right forward mount next. Then the right rear. Then the left rear.
She went to the toolbox and got the cable tester and checked each motor feed connection, working from motor to terminal and back.
Silas watched her. When she moved to the second toolbox for the electrical test leads, he walked to the other side of the Skiffer and began checking the frame fasteners on the left side, working from forward to rear, his own torque finding each bolt head and checking its torque.
They worked in silence, the two of them, on opposite sides of the Skiffer, until the check was complete.
~*~
Ned came up the driveway with his headlights on.
The sky had gone deep blue overhead and orange along the western horizon, and the first crickets had begun in the grass at the field edge, and the robins in the treeline were making their last songs of the day with the same gusto they brought to all their singing. Ned saw their faces as he came around the Airsteed to help with the ramps and made no comment, connecting the ramps and stepping back to hold the flashlight while they walked the cart up into the bed.
He climbed back into the cab and turned the radio on. The Plymouth Patriots and the Grisham Innovators, third period, the Patriots up by two. The announcer’s voice filled the cab with the sport-specific cadence that could be nothing else.
June sat with her hands in her lap and looked out the window at the dark fields passing. Silas sat at the window and looked out at nothing. Ned drove and listened to the game and said nothing, because Ned had been driving people around this city long enough to know when people did not want to talk.
The highway gave way to the outer neighborhoods and the outer neighborhoods gave way to the city proper; the electric lamps of the commercial districts passed overhead, and then they were on Clement Street, and Ned was backing into the dock with the same single smooth motion he had used that morning, the Airsteed’s rear end finding the dock edge in the dark without visible effort.
June and Silas walked the cart down the ramps. Silas paid Ned, counting the bills in the dock light, and thanked him. Ned nodded, disconnected his ramps, and left, his taillights visible for a moment at the alley’s end and then gone.
The loading door came down.
June pulled the tarpaulin off the Skiffer and began her post-flight inspection. She started at the left forward rotor, because that was where she had started every inspection since they began working on the vehicle, and she worked clockwise, which was the order Silas had established in the first week and which she had kept to because it was logical and because consistency meant nothing was skipped.
She did not look at Silas.
Silas sighed and went to begin locking the Tinkery up for the night, starting in the rear and working his way to the front. He had locked everything before they had left for the farm that morning, and the evening lockup was therefore more confirmation than necessity, but he did it anyway. It was habit, and tonight habit was preferable to thought.
He was not in a mood to hurry. He took extra care with each window latch and door bolt, working his way through the building’s rear section with the walking stick hooked over his forearm and both hands free for the latches. The physical work of it was uncomplicated, and he was grateful for that. His mind kept returning to the farm, to the transmitter in his coat pocket, to June’s face when he had held up the pieces of the end cap assembly. He turned a window latch and moved to the next one.
He had reached the northwest section of the building, behind the electrical equipment display, when he remembered the side loading door.
He had not thought about it in years. It was simply part of the building’s fabric, sealed and forgotten, as much a feature of the wall as the brick around it. But if he was locking up properly, he should check it.
He moved through the gap between two shelf units, pushing past the tarpaulin edge of the wall-climbing painter that he had not uncovered since the morning June came back, and through a narrower gap behind the early electrical equipment display where the components of three or four unfinished projects from the 1880s were stacked in a configuration he no longer entirely remembered the logic of. The boards here had not seen regular foot traffic in a long time. The dust on them was undisturbed in the cone of his lamp’s light.
He reached the door.
He put his hand on the handle, expecting the resistance of eighteen years of disuse, the slight grating of rust on rust that old iron produced when asked to move again. His hand turned the handle and felt nothing of the kind. The mechanism rotated smoothly and completely, with the easy action of a handle that had been operated recently and had been oiled before that.
He stopped.
He held the handle in the turned position and looked at it. Then he lowered the lamp and looked at the floor at his feet.
The dust at the door’s threshold was disturbed in the specific pattern of a door swung inward, describing a clean arc swept through the dust where the door’s lower edge had passed, the arc’s radius matching the door’s width, the swept area ending at the point where the door would stand fully open. On either side of the arc, overlapping it at the threshold, were boot prints. More than one set, he thought, though the prints overlapped in a way that made counting difficult. The prints came in from outside and went back out again.
He straightened and stood looking at the floor for a moment.
Someone had been inside the Tinkery.
He drew breath to call for June and in the same instant heard her voice from the front of the building, calling his name. The sound of it reached him around the corners of two shelf rows and through the displays and across sixty feet of Tinkery floor, and what was in her voice stopped the breath in his chest.
He moved.
His bad leg did what it did when he asked too much of it, which was to send a specific and energetic signal of protest up through his hip with every accelerated step, and he ignored it the way he had ignored it for twenty years and went as fast as the leg and the walking stick and the cluttered floor between the shelf units would allow. He called her name, and she called back, her voice carrying the same quality it had carried when it first reached him, and he tracked it toward the front of the building, rounding the last shelf unit at the edge of the main exhibition hall.
He stopped.
Twenty feet away, in front of the main entrance doors, a figure was on the floor. In the lamplight from Clement Street coming through the display window, he could see someone kneeling over the figure, bent forward, both hands occupied with something he could not immediately determine.
He covered the distance between himself and the two forms without being aware of the steps it took.
The kneeling figure was June. She had her back to him and was bent over the person on the floor, one hand on the shoulder, and when she heard him she looked up over her shoulder. Her face in the lamplight was not the face she had been wearing all evening. That face had been closed and controlled and pointed away from him. This face was open in a way he had not seen since she was fifteen years old.
Her eyes were wet.
“It’s Vernon,” she said. Her voice came out compressed, the words pushed through a throat that was occupied doing other work.
He moved around her and crouched, the bad leg folding with its usual complaint, and brought the light close to the face on the floor.
Vernon Byle’s face was not Vernon Byle’s face. Or rather, it was, but the surface that made it his, the composed arrangement of features that he wore the way other men wore a well-fitted coat, the ease and the warmth and the command of it, was entirely gone. What remained was the underlying structure, and across that structure someone had worked with systematic thoroughness. The left eye was swollen entirely closed, the tissue around it raised and discolored in the dark way that meant the damage was deep rather than superficial. The nose had bled, and the blood had dried in channels down both sides of his face, into the collar of the charcoal morning coat. There were additional impact sites across the jaw and the right cheekbone, each one distinct, the spacing and pattern of them not consistent with a fall or a collision but with something else entirely.
His chest moved. The movement was audible as well as visible, each breath drawing against a resistance that breathing should not have.
Silas put two fingers against Vernon’s neck, found the pulse, assessed it.
He looked up at June. She was looking at Vernon’s face, and holding hard to her compsure.
“How long has he been here?” Silas said.
“I don’t know,” June said. “I found him when I came forward. I don’t know how long.”
Silas looked at Vernon’s face again, at the dried blood and the swollen tissue, and thought about the side loading door and the boot prints in the dust, and felt the two things connect in a way that produced a cold, specific clarity in the middle of his chest.
She put her hand on Vernon’s arm. “Vernon. It’s June. You’re inside. You’re safe.”
Vernon’s undamaged eye moved. Found her face. His lips moved.
“Vernon, don’t try to -”
He moved. Not a small movement, not a shifting of position. He pushed himself upright against whatever it cost him, his arms shaking with the effort, his damaged face contorted, and got himself to something between sitting and propped, and when he spoke it was not a murmur but the voice of a man who has decided that what he has to say is worth the pain of saying it at volume.
“Run.” He looked at June. He looked at Silas. “They are coming for you!”
Then the effort went out of him, and he dropped back, June barely catching him before his head hit the boards.
You and your cliff-hangers. Damn!